It’s not unheard of for a lawyer in court to have ingested a bit of demon liquor, but it’s usually not the prosecutor. Clarke County Attorney Michelle Rivera is an exception.

[O]n Oct. 18, before Simmerman’s plea hearing, a Clarke County sheriff’s deputy noticed Rivera in a courtroom. In a criminal complaint, the deputy would later write the attorney was “slurring her words and stumbling on her feet,” and noted that she “sat in a chair and swayed her head back and [forth], actions common with being intoxicated.”

The deputy asked to speak to Rivera in a small room by the courtroom. It was there that he detected the smell of alcohol on her. When she refused to take a breathalyzer test, the deputy arrested Rivera on suspicion of public intoxication.

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Shed no tear. Les Moonves will not go hungry. But the Board of Directors of CBS found a hook to deny his $120 million severance package by terminating him for cause. Even so, it’s not good enough because it wasn’t the “right” cause.

It’s a small sliver of justice for the women who say he harassed them and then ruined their careers when they rebuffed him. But the fact that he stood to gain any money at all exposes the preposterous way that corporate America has treated sexual harassment.

It’s worth noting what should be obvious: Sexual harassment is illegal. That has been the case ever since Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, a 1986 Supreme Court decision that said that sexual harassment violates laws prohibiting workplace sex discrimination. And yet companies that catch an executive engaging in this illegal act can’t always fire him for cause. Even more typically, they turn a blind eye to such conduct. It bears repeating: This behavior violates the law.

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The Fourth Circuit majority opinion described it as a “a chant that glorified violence against women, including rape and necrophilia,” and “repulsive.” The University of Mary Washington rugby team, at an off-campus party, was chanting, or more likely singing, the bawdy 1920’s drinking song, “Walking Down Canal Street.” It set into motion a series of events that included the dissolution of the rugby team and led to the local chapter of Feminist Majority Foundation suing the school under Title IX.

The suit was dismissed on a motion to dismiss in the District Court, but the majority reversed.

The plaintiffs appealed to the Fourth Circuit, and this morning, in an opinion that was shockingly dismissive of the profound implications of this case for free speech, that court reinstated several of their claims. The bulk of the court’s decision turned on whether UMW “exercise[d] substantial control over both the harasser and the context in which the known harassment occurs,” as required to establish Title IX liability under the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education.

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Maybe Idris Elba will play a lawyer in the movies, but he’s not one for real, no matter how sexy he is. That didn’t stop him from parroting the same simplistic slogan that cops have used forever to persuade people from refusing to consent.

British actor and 2018 “sexiest man alive” Idris Elba recently told The Sunday Times that the #MeToo movement is “only difficult if you’re a man with something to hide.” Vanity Fair contrasted Elba’s uncompromising stance with remarks made by Matt Damon and Henry Cavill, who both had to walk back their criticisms of #MeToo’s potential excesses and their perceived sympathy for accused men.

The appeal of the simplistic is undeniable. Short. Pithy. The sort of “answer” anyone, no matter how mind-numbingly shallow, can grasp. Continue reading →

While she never got that television show of her own, she did get to see her name emblazoned across the screen on Saturday Night Live and was interviewed on the Today Show. Ingham County Circuit Judge Rosemarie Aquilina was a star.

[Aquilina] told Today Show hosts Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie that she was surprised and pleased by how much the world took notice of Nassar’s case.

“This is a world-wide epidemic,” she said Monday. “It opened the world to say ‘me too, let’s start the discussion,’ which should have happened years ago and this (the widespread abuse by Nassar) never would have happened.”

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Compromise is one of those words that feels good, because it seems as if it’s always more reasonable to be, well, more reasonable. Except when invoking the brilliance of King Solomon, people often forget that the entire point of “splitting the baby” was that it would end up killing the baby. It wasn’t really an invitation to compromise, but a test of who cared enough to save the baby from certain death.

In an editorial at the Washington Post on the proposed Title IX regulations, the brain trust addresses a concern that a system providing minimal due process will serve to dissuade victims from coming forward.

At the same time, though, there are ill-advised revisions that are cause for legitimate concern because of the chilling effect they would have on the willingness of students to come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct.

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The video of cops pulling her one-year-old son from Jazmine Headley’s arms, while another held onlookers at bay with her Taser, generated well-deserved outrage. The “offense” for which security guards in the SNAP office called in muscle was Headley’s sitting on the floor. To the extent there was any defense to the police conduct, it was that she was doing something she shouldn’t have been doing, and what else were they to do?

This rhetorical question, “what else were they to do,” has plagued criminal law and its reformers. There are rules by which society runs, some dealing with serious matters of life and death, others utterly banal, just random rules for their own sake.

As people fail to be as orderly as others want them to be, the question of how to deal with it short of a scene like this, risking maiming a baby over the grievous offense of floor-sitting, or more likely, refusing to be compliant with security guards who demand in impolite terms that you cease your grievous floor-sitting.

Conor Friedersdorf takes on the question. Continue reading →

This is the 10,000th post. Has it been worth it? Is it still worth it?

The New York Times has an excellent op-ed about how the internet, Dr. Google, spreads fake medical information that puts lives at risk.*

While misinformation has been the object of great attention in politics, medical misinformation might have an even greater body count. As is true with fake news in general, medical lies tend to spread further than truths on the internet — and they have very real repercussions.

We all knew the internet had the capacity to spread misinformation as well as reliable information. What we didn’t know, way back when, was whether people would be capable of distinguishing between the two. In contrast to the outliers, crazies and liars deliberately trying to scam people, some tried to provide sound information. After all, if the only information available on the internet was fake, then what else could people find? Continue reading →

Had she been working off a case, having gotten caught for her own misdeed and doing what she could to save her own skin, there might have been some comfort taken in the parity of scoundrels. After all, there is no honor among thieves, so it would have been entirely understandable for one person devoid of integrity to save her own skin at the expense of another.

But that wasn’t the case at all, and her decision to become Informer 3838 was one of conscience.

In what is considered one of Victoria’s biggest legal scandals, it was revealed on Monday morning that the female criminal barrister, who operated as Informer 3838 from 2005 to 2009, gave police information about hundreds of criminals.
Some of the criminals were on the lawyer’s own client list and among the biggest names in Australia’s underworld, including jailed drug lord Tony Mokbel and his associate, drug trafficker Rob Karam.

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